Death of a Bookseller

Brogan Roach works the shelves at Spines, a struggling chain bookshop in Walthamstow, dresses only in black, and lives for true crime: the podcasts, the case files, the intimate details of famous murders. Solitary and prickly, she has built her identity around a fascination with killers and their victims. Then the shop hires Laura, a warm, beret-wearing poet who finds the true-crime obsession tacky and exploitative, and everything shifts.

When Roach discovers that Laura writes about murder victims because her own mother was the last woman killed by a notorious local strangler, she becomes convinced the two of them share a rare, fated bond. Her attempts to get closer curdle into stalking, and the more she pushes, the more Laura recoils. Told in the women's alternating first-person voices, the novel tightens into a queasy, escalating spiral.

Alice Slater's darkly comic debut is a sharp suspense novel about obsession, grief, and the ethics of true-crime culture. It asks who owns a victim's story, and what happens when curiosity mistakes itself for connection.